But the drainage canals that shunted lake water out to sea did not really end the cycles of flood and drought. They did not subdue Mother Nature, they just made her mad. In dry seasons the canals parched the Everglades, causing muck fires that burned away the rich soil and salt water intrusion that threatened the wells and the underground aquifers that supplied most of South Florida's drinking water. In wet seasons the canals could not move enough water out of the marsh to save the crops and shacks that had moved into it. Water may run downhill, but in the flatlands of the Everglades, which rarely declines more than an inch or two per mile, it runs exceedingly slowly.  

In 1926, calamity staged its dress rehearsal. A Category Four hurricane tore through Miami with 150-mile-per-hour winds, damaging or destroying every building in the business district, quieting the riotous land boom. Kleinberg cites estimates from hurricane researchers that if a similar storm pounded glittering downtown Miami today, it would cause $80 billion worth of damage. In fact, though, most of the 300-plus casualties from the 1926 hurricane came in the Everglades, after storm surges blasted through the wimpy Okeechobee dike, drowning the entire city of Moore Haven. 

"The great Miami hurricane of 1926 had been a wake-up call," Mykle writes. Eighty-five pages later, he writes it again: "The 1926 Miami hurricane season had been a wake-up call for the Everglades." But if the 1926 storm was a wake-up call, then South Florida hit the snooze button and went back to sleep. The porous dike was quickly patched up with more muck, and the politicians ignored the faint cries for tougher flood protection. Eager to revive the battered tourism industry, Florida's governor, John Martin, insisted that the tales of doom and destruction were exaggerated. The white farmers and the black fieldhands of the Everglades went back to their beans and corn and potatoes. In the summer of 1928, when the lake started rising again, the chief engineer of the Everglades Drainage District refused to open its spillways to empty its waters toward the sea, because he did not expect overflow conditions. "The chief engineer never expects any overflow conditions," the publisher of the Everglades News groused at the time.  

The hurricane of 1928 created the ultimate overflow conditions. It pushed the lake's water north, then flung it back south, forming an inland tidal wave that plowed through the dike and drowned the Everglades. It was yet another wake-up call for South Florida, at least for the residents who were not already dead.

Louder and higher and lower and wider the sound and motion spread, mounting, sinking, darking.

It woke up old Okechobee and the monster began to roll in his bed. Began to roll and complain like a peevish world on a grumble.... Under its multiplied roar could be heard a mighty sound of grinding rock and timber and a wail. They looked back. Saw people trying to run in raging waters and screaming when they found they couldn't.... Ten feet higher and as far as they could see the muttering wall advanced before the braced-up waters like a road crusher on a cosmic scale. The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.

That was the most vivid account ever written of the 1928 Okeechobee storm--or just about any storm. And I left out the best part, because I didn't want to give away the source: "The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God." 

It is not the fault of Robert Mykle or Eliot Kleinberg that they do not write as well as Zora Neale Hurston did, because almost nobody writes as well as Zora Neale Hurston did. Their Eyes Were Watching God will always be the standard text of the disaster of 1928; Janie will be its most memorable survivor, Tea Cake its symbolic victim. Black men really were drafted into the cleanup at gunpoint. Coffins really were reserved for white victims. And it really was hard to determine the race of the bloated, decomposed corpses. Obviously, though, Hurston wrote fiction. The winds in 1928 did not really hit 200 miles-per-hour. The lake did rampage through its flimsy dike again, but Hurston did not really explain how or why. The true story deserves to be told, too. 

Mykle tries to provide a non-fictional account of the real people who lived and died in the shadow of the lake, based primarily on two dozen interviews with survivors. He does a nice job of portraying Everglades frontier life: the moonshine, the politics, the path of development. He provides detailed portraits of a few frontier families. He also relates some dramatic stories about the disaster itself. In the Glades Hotel, Belle Glade's only building to survive the storm, men huddled around a radio heard a calm announcement that West Palm Beach would be spared, followed by a shouted addendum that a monster hurricane was battering West Palm and coming their way. Two boys snuck upstairs to smoke, only to get drenched when a huge gust of wind blew off the roof: "It was as if God was punishing us for wanting a smoke," one said. Vernie and Willie Boots rode out the flood on the same ten-foot chunk of ceiling debris, neither knowing the other was there until morning. Vernie clung to the debris all night; Willie passed out, but not before an iron spike pierced through his hand, nailing him to the makeshift raft and saving his life.  

As history, though, Mykle's book is not exactly authoritative. He provides no footnotes or endnotes; his bibliography has just thirty entries, including the History of Jupiter website, and some of his research does not inspire confidence. On page 21, in his summary of the Seminole Wars, America's nineteenth-century ethnic cleansing operation in the Everglades, he gets the amount the United States paid for Florida wrong, claims the sale prompted the First Seminole War when it was really the other way around, gets the name and the geographic scope of the Indian Removal Act wrong, cuts the cost of the Seminole Wars in half, and misses the point of the entire conflict, which was as much about slavery as it was about white settlement. And that's just page 21.  

In fairness, Mykle is not really trying to explain Florida history; he is trying to tell a story. The real problem with Killer 'Cane is the hyperventilating drum-roll prose he uses to tell it. "It was hot," begins the prologue. "It was raining," begins Chapter One. Here's more on the wild ride of Vernie Boots: "The water was slapping at his chest and rising. He could taste the muddy water. It tasted like death." And more: "It was black. No lights. No moon. No stars. Just black. The rain was black; the water was black; the waves were black; the air was black. He might as well have been blind as well as dead. But he hung on." He kept hanging, blind as well as dead, but not, apparently, mute. "He cried out for his mother, his father, his brothers, and was answered only by the howling wind. It screamed in his face--the howls of the dead, the dead that he might soon be joining." For God's sake, for our sake, let go! 

Kleinberg is not an overly elegant writer either, but he lets the story of the storm tell itself, without the violins and the percussion. He simply relays great anecdotes: two men shaving as the winds pick up so that they will make handsome corpses; a woman singing "Hide me, O my Savior, hide till the storm of life is past" while riding out the hurricane in a tree; the racist Governor Martin consoling a black man who had lost his wife and six children; a field hand asking his boss afterward, "Where does the wind go when the wind done blowing?" Kleinberg helps to illuminate the murky tale of a white National Guardsman who killed a black laborer in cold blood for refusing to help with the cleanup, but he also spends an entire chapter exposing the Negro Workers Relief Committee's virulent efforts to mau-mau the Red Cross, probably the least racist organization in South Florida at the time. Black Cloud trails off a bit toward the end--especially in an arbitrary chapter about Hurston--but it tells the true story of the storm. 

It also tells the whole story of the storm, as opposed to Mykle's focus on a few families near the lake. Kleinberg unearths new information at every step of the hurricane's path, including a sickening State Department memo to the American consul in Guadeloupe, where the hurricane killed 600 islanders four days before it reached Florida: "In view of the rottenness of local politics on the island it might be inadvisable to hand such a large sum as $10,000 to the local political gentry who range from 'café au lait to café noir' in complexion.... The governor of the island, a white Frenchman from continental France, would seem to be the appropriate person to handle the money." Kleinberg devotes an entire chapter to the devastation in Puerto Rico, where another 600 were killed, and the U.S. Weather Bureau office complained that one of its rest rooms had "nothing but the seat left." 

Kleinberg also documents in infuriating detail how the Weather Bureau failed Florida, and how its forecasters refused to acknowledge that they had failed completely. Richard Gray, the bureau's Miami meteorologist, confidently announced the day before the hurricane struck that it "will not cause high winds on the lower East Coast of Florida." He stuck to his guns that night. It was only by dawn--too late for the morning papers, or what we would call the news cycle--that he started predicting trouble. Yet the bureau's top official in Florida had the gall to blame the storm's victims in his post-disaster report to Washington: "Warnings of the storm were widely disseminated to the profit of all; and many who lost their lives on Lake Okeechobee was [sic] due to the ignoring of the information in possession of all." In truth, the catastrophe was more the result of heeding the information. 

III. 

In many ways, South Florida is much better prepared for the Big One today than it was in 1928. In our age of satellite transmissions, multi-variable computer models, and mass communications, forecasters can give a pretty good range for a storm's probable path five days before it makes landfall, and the word can go out over radio, television, and the Internet well in advance. Hurricane Isabel was a textbook case of better forecasts and better outreach leading to better preparations. Emergency management operations have been upgraded as well, and the Hoover Dike is so massive that researchers have modeled five thousand possible hurricanes without finding a scenario where a storm surge could overtop it. 

That said, Al Roker is still a long way from Al Einstein: meteorology remains an inexact science. I was given a fine sense just how inexact a science it is on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1928 storm, when I watched an affable hurricane researcher named Chris Landsea, who had just spent the weekend flying around Isabel's eye in the federal government's $50 million turboprop hurricane-chaser, speak at a West Palm Beach hotel. The title of his talk was "Could It Happen Again?" He began by answering his own question. "It's gonna happen again, you can count on it," he said. "We're lucky. South Florida is going to dodge the bullet this time. But I guarantee you, we're not going to keep on dodging them." 

The National Hurricane Center in Miami has narrowed the "cone of probability" for most storms to about ninety miles the day before landfall, but it still has trouble forecasting storm intensity--and as Kleinberg points out, 90 miles is the difference between Fort Pierce and Fort Lauderdale. It is easy to imagine how South Floridians, spoiled by impressively precise forecasts like the one that nailed Isabel, might yawn when their chummy local weatherman tells them a storm is passing to the north. And when that storm turns south, it is easy to imagine a million panicked residents jumping into their cars and fleeing for I-95, which would be an extremely dangerous place to be parked when the Big One hits. Especially since the supposedly impregnable Hoover Dike, while apparently too tall to be over-topped, is too porous to withstand prolonged high water. A breach could create 1928 all over again--except, of course, that the wall of rushing water would be many times larger, and many times more people would be in its path. 

I do not really believe in natural disasters. Natural events only become disasters when people stand in their way. Wildfires, for example, are a perfectly natural phenomenon; they became tragic calamities only after Westerners started building flammable vacation getaways and bedroom communities in the forest. Similarly, the Everglades always flooded during storms, but that only became a problem after people started living in its soggy lowlands. And now millions of people live in the former Everglades, in suburbs such as Weston, Sweetwater, Wellington, Davie, West Miami, Plantation, Miami Springs, and Miami Lakes to the west of the east coast, and increasingly east of Fort Myers, Cape Coral, and Naples on the west coast.  

This is just the southernmost example of a silent national scandal, in which America has drained and developed its wetlands and floodplains, the areas that nature intended to get soaked during storms. Guess what? They still get soaked during storms. Natural wetlands absorb floodwaters and re-charge underground aquifers; McMansions absorb floodwaters, too, but in a rather different way. Drainage and development, it turns out, are not always the hallmarks of Progress, but we have been willfully slow to figure that out. This is why hurricane damages increased every decade in the last century, and skyrocketed to an all-time high in the 1990s, even though it was actually a fairly mild hurricane decade. There is simply more human stuff along the coast to get damaged. 

For this Americans can thank lax local zoning codes, a skewed federal flood insurance program that promotes risky development, and mindless media coverage that lionizes disaster victims who vow to stay put. But most of all they can thank the Army Corps, which is the bureaucratic embodiment of America's war on Mother Nature. The agency's motto is "Essayons," or "let us try." Ever since the Mississippi flood and the Okeechobee hurricane, it has tried to subdue the nation's waters in order to keep homes and businesses dry, congressional pork-barrelers happy, and its own employees busy. The Corps is best known for diking, damming, and dredging America's rivers with environmentally damaging projects that have encouraged rampant development in floodplains. But it has also armored America's coast with environmentally damaging seawalls, artificial dunes, and rock revetments that have encouraged rampant development along coastlines. Today, 50 million Americans live along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Fortunately, major hurricanes never hit the Gulf and Atlantic coasts.  

Oh, wait. It turns out that, from 1900 through 1997, 57 different hurricanes made landfall in Florida alone. In 1935, just when the Corps thought it had protected South Florida forever with the Hoover Dike, the most powerful storm ever recorded in America trashed the Keys. And in 1947 a pair of hurricanes left most of South Florida underwater for weeks, even though the Hoover Dike held. That is when politicians demanded new plumbing to assure water control as well as water supply for the entire region, which led to the Rube Goldberg-style Central and South Florida Flood Control Project that Strowd used to operate.  

The Corps set out to tame the Everglades once and for all, manhandling Mother Nature with levees and canals and pumps. The northern Everglades was converted into a giant agricultural area that produces one-fourth of America's sugar. The central Everglades was converted into glorified storage reservoirs. The eastern Everglades was converted into wall-to-wall sprawl. The southern Everglades was protected as a national park, the first ever preserved for biology rather than scenery, but it's now a hydrologic mess, sometimes parched, sometimes drowned, always overwhelmed by invasive species and pollution. Gin-clear Florida Bay has collapsed. Ninety percent of the skinny-legged wading birds that John James Audubon once observed "in such numbers to actually block out the light of the sun" have vanished; and so have Everglade snail kites, Okeechobee gourds, and Cape Sable seaside sparrows. This system was designed to protect and to serve about two million people; South Florida has now swelled above seven million residents, and continues to grow faster than Haiti, Mexico, or Bangladesh. 

This is the no-win hand that Strowd was dealt. Last May, meteorologists predicted a drought year, so Strowd kept lake levels relatively high, because the sugar industry relies on it for irrigation, and nearby communities rely on it for drinking water. But then it began to rain, including a record-breaking downpour that dumped nearly ten inches on Fort Lauderdale in just four hours. (I was caught outside without an umbrella when it began; it felt like being stabbed in the head repeatedly with an ice pick.) Soon the lake reached 17 feet, wiping out huge meadows of bulrushes that provide fish habitat in the lake, and causing all sorts of environmental and economic problems throughout the system. There was severe flooding in the central Everglades, stranding deer and other wildlife, drowning baby egrets and storks, washing away ecologically valuable tree islands, and infuriating the Miccosukee Indians who retain rights to the area. But Strowd could not release the area's water south to Everglades National Park, because of fears that unnatural pulses would drive the seaside sparrow to extinction.  

Meanwhile Strowd had to blow out the estuaries with tremendous blasts of water from the lake, because the Hoover Dike now starts to leak at 16 feet, and it seems to be getting leakier. It is a dike built to stop temporary storm surges, not a dam designed to hold back high water for long periods of time; the Corps believes it already needs more than $200 million worth of reinforcements. It's a good thing the Hoover Dike is not the only barrier between a trillion gallons of water and the Gold Coast. Oh, wait. Strowd told me that a week before Isabel made landfall, he got a call from a meteorologist who had run a computer model in which the storm passed directly over Lake Okeechobee, stalled, turned down Florida's southwest coast, then shot back up the east coast, dumping seven days worth of driving rain on the peninsula. "I said: 'Please tell me that's fiction,'" Strowd recalled. "He said, 'Well, we don't expect it to happen.' But you know, it could, and it would be a disaster beyond definition. Think Hurricane Andrew, plus two feet of water, with no way for people to get to the hospital. Even Irene overwhelmed our system. Something like that, there would be absolutely nothing we could do. It would be worse than 1928." 

Strowd used to dream about a day when South Florida would have so much room to store fresh water that he would not have to use the lake as a reservoir, or worry about high water collapsing the dike, or blow out fragile estuaries to avoid a collapse, or steal water from the Everglades to supply sugar barons and suburbanites, or dump water on the Everglades to protect sugar barons and suburbanites. And guess what? His dream was enacted into law! It is called The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.  

Sure, Everglades restoration was marketed as a feel-good environmental rescue mission for an imperiled national treasure; it was so bipartisan that President Clinton signed it into law in the Oval Office with Jeb Bush at his side on the same day the Supreme Court was hearing final arguments in Bush v. Gore. But it is really an $8 billion water storage project for South Florida, relying on 180,000 acres worth of surface reservoirs, 330 aquifer wells, and four highly questionable storage technologies that could scuttle the whole plan. The project--supported by South Florida's all-powerful sugar and real estate industries as well as some (but not all) environmentalists, and designed by, you guessed it, the Army Corps of Engineers--is not allowed to reduce anyone's flood protection or water supplies, and is in fact required to supply enough new water to allow South Florida to double its population yet again, but it is not expected to provide any new water to Everglades National Park until at least 2020. It is a good thing unrestrained population growth isn't destroying the Everglades in the first place. Oh, wait.  

The Everglades restoration plan, in other words, is essentially a continuation of the cleanup from the 1928 storm. It is an effort to give the next god of South Florida--Strowd decided to quit after last year's hurricane season, in part because he was tired of worrying about the Big One--new places to stash water so that he won't have to stiff anyone or suck the Everglades dry during droughts, and so that he won't have to flood anyone or any oysters during storms. Strowd was stuck with the proverbial ten pounds of crap and a five-pound bag; and Congress is basically spending billions of dollars to give his successors a bigger bag. This is a worthy goal, but Everglades restoration is already becoming the national blueprint for reviving ecosystems, including the Great Lakes, Mississippi Delta, Missouri River, San Francisco Bay-Delta, and a proposed $14 billion effort to stop coastal Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf. (Louisiana's coastal marshes and barrier islands, ravaged by the Corps levees that contain the Mississippi River, used to provide natural hurricane protection that helped prevent New Orleans from becoming America's Atlantis.) It is being studied as a model for the Pantanal of South America, the Okavango Delta of sub-Saharan Africa, and the Iraqi marshes destroyed by Saddam Hussein. It is startling how little ecosystem restoration it actually guarantees for $8 billion. 

Corps engineers often point out that they cannot simply move seven million people out of South Florida; they started a war with Mother Nature long ago, and they need to keep fighting it to prevent 1928 from happening again. They made similar arguments in 1928. And they are right, to a point: the Everglades will never be restored to its purely natural state. The Corps cannot set the Mississippi River free, either; it cannot tear down all its dams and levees, nor should it. But that hardly means that the Everglades floodplain, and the other wetlands in South Florida and the rest of America, cannot be returned to more natural states than they are in right now--not only because they are kitchens and nurseries for wildlife, or because they re-charge and filter underground aquifers, but because even the Army Corps of Engineers cannot keep Mother Nature in her cage forever. Water shall run downhill. Floodplains shall eventually flood. Wetlands shall get wet. 

Anyway, you do not have to be an ecofreak to see that South Florida's 75-year rebellion against Mother Nature is ruining the place. Schools and hospitals are hopelessly over-crowded; endless highways such as the Sawgrass and Palmetto expressways are hopelessly congested and littered with the corpses of dead critters; aquifers are so depleted that lawn-watering restrictions are being enforced in the rainy season; creepy exotic species like melaleuca, Brazilian pepper, and Old World climbing fern are spreading like The Blob; bipartisan commissions have declared that the region is no longer sustainable; cookie-cutter suburbs are wiping out the last tropical hammocks and cypress stands and marl prairies. The Florida Panthers ice hockey arena sits so close to the edge of the Everglades that an errant slapshot could almost land in the swamp, while the actual Florida panther is at the edge of extinction because runaway sprawl has paved over its habitats. Animal control officers got more than 18,000 complaints last year from Floridians who found alligators in their backyards. When will they realize that they are in the alligators' backyards? 

For all the rhetoric about sustainable development and planned communities, growth is still the real god of South Florida. As long as the sun keeps shining, as long as the air conditioning and bug spray keep working, as long as the Social Security checks keep coming--actually, long after the Social Security checks run out--people are still going to want to move here. But sooner or later Fantasyland is going to have to learn that "growth management" is not a euphemism for "communist plot." Of all the lessons of the storm of 1928, the most important is the most obvious: Mother Nature can be a bitch. Sometimes it makes sense to get out of her way.